Guilty

In the fall of 2003 I appeared on a National Lawyers Guild panel with attorney Lynne Stewart after she was indicted for illegally assisting her client “the blind sheikh” in furthering terrorist acts. I wrote about the experience in “Face to face with Lynne Stewart.” Not to put too fine a point on it — it was a chilling experience.
Stewart’s trial dragged on forever and relied on a reading of transcripts of recorded conversations. The jury has deliberated the charges against Stewart and her two codefendants for a month. Today the jury convicted them all: “Rights lawyer convicted of helping terrorists.”
I think this was a difficult but meritorious case for the government. I extend my sincere congratulations to Assistant United States Attorney Christopher Morvillo and his team for the result they obtained in this case and express my gratitude to former Attorney General John Ashcroft who approved the prosecution. (Courtesy of Instapundit.)
HINDROCKET adds: The defense complained that the court improperly admitted a video tape of Osama bin Laden urging support for Ms. Stewart, which turned out to be about as effective as his campaign pitch for John Kerry. Peter Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University, summed up the case quite well, in my opinion: “I think lawyers need to be advocates, but they don’t need to be accomplices.”
The AP describes Ms. Stewart as “a firebrand, left-wing activist known for representing radicals and revolutionaries in her 30 years on the New York legal scene.” We have often commented on how many leftists have seamlessly taken up the cause of Islamic fascism–a movement that superficially seems to have little in common with Marxism or other forms of Western socialism. The alliance between the Western left and Islamism suggests that Western radicalism was always mostly about hating the West in general, and especially, America.